‘Oh, the silver surfers WhatsApp group, Kieran at the pharmacy, a few of the cousins and Celine, and Pam of course …’
The list went on, including the nice woman who cleans for him every Friday, his podiatrist and the postman. I started thinking it was basically everyone he’d spoken to in the past few days, and several people he would’ve had to go out of his way to encounter. I tuned back in when I sensed he was wrapping up, and he ended by confirming that the son of the man up the road who sells solid fuel was now also up to speed. I was, of course, delighted. As the ninth of eleven, there were very few landmarks of my life that were particularly momentous or memorable for Daddy. By the time of my arrival, my infant antics were probably a bit like watching those later Apollo missions, when they’d run out of ideas and just ended up driving around or doing step aerobics. My father ardently disputes that this is the case, but I have always presumed that after, say, number five or six, we all just collapsed into a mottled, whinging blur of nosebleeds and missing socks, an amorphous child-mass of sincerely loved but not necessarily individuated entities. I remember reading the scores of Christmas cards we received one year, when I was seven or eight, all addressed to Joe O’Reilly & Family, and working out that, in terms of total weight percentage, I barely constituted the dot over the i in the word ‘Family’. If Hollywood, in their eternal search for propulsive thrills, were to make a film about us, I probably wouldn’t even be a named character, instead listed in the credits as ‘Second Fat Baby’, or ‘Crying Birthday Redhead’.
There were, of course, other benefits to Daddy spreading the word, and sitting with Patricia in Fermanagh, I now held some of them in my hand.
‘Hold on to whatever,’ she said as we sat down with a neat parcel of eleven letters, written in the last few years of Mammy’s life. ‘Sure, I know where they are. There’s no rush.’
The first letter is dated 30 November 1987, just three weeks after the Remembrance Day bombings in which twelve people were killed by an IRA attack in Enniskillen.
‘There’s been so much sadness,’ she wrote. ‘Enniskillen really upset us all – I’ll never forget that Sunday – it was like a nightmare – listening and watching. I was thinking of the past pupils’ retreat and parking in there. I suppose the only hope is that good will come out of it.’
The letters Patricia gave me comprise less than five thousand words, and contain no direct mention of me at all. They cover my mother’s near-constant visits to people in hospitals, or attendance at funerals, and the care she gave to Daddy’s mother in the final stages of her life, eschewing the hospice in favour of letting her see out her days in the company of her grandchildren. They document her own illness too, and the changing fortunes of her battle with the cancer. But mostly they give encouragement, support and offers of prayerful solidarity to Patricia, alongside exhaustive updates on what we were all up to.
‘Sinead is very busy with school,’ she wrote in February 1991, ‘she has also been in the school show Brigadoon and this week she’s in the Operatic Society’s Carousel. Dara is very involved with computers and the school magazine. Shane has joined a “very important” football team and spends a lot of time training. Maeve and Orla patiently await their 11+ results and we’ve been doing the rounds of “Open Days” at the local schools. All the others are busy in Nazareth House in their own way coping with the new curriculum. They’re all very happy which means a lot. Sinead and Shane go to Germany during the Easter holidays. I’m supposed to be going too but apart from this setback, we have discovered that Maeve and Orla’s confirmation is the day we come back so it’s all very much up in the air at the moment.’
The setback she mentions is a lump in her neck, the third or fourth such growth in as many years. She did make it on the school jaunt in the end, but would never recover from this round of her illness, dying eight months later.
It seems profane to see her making plans and hoping for the best, but it’s deeply touching that she wasn’t mired in self-doubt and misery. More than anything else, the opportunity to see, to hold in my hand, something so clearly in my mother’s voice was revelatory, and made me want to do more digging. Mammy had become, like Jesus or Derry City’s league-winning side of 1989, one of those figures I didn’t know personally, but recognised from being up on the walls of our house.
Patricia had been Mammy’s first port of call with pregnancy announcements, although not by letter but via a morning phone call that might sometimes have been made before even Daddy was aware. Mammy always intuited she was pregnant very early, upon finding that the smell of her wake-up coffee made her nauseous. Many was the morning Patricia would receive the call before an abandoned brew had finished spiralling down my mother’s sink. Patricia was on hand, not just because she was Mammy’s best friend but because she always seemed delighted by the news, whereas other friends might have raised eyebrows at the increasing population of the O’Reilly household. It occurred to me quite late that this would have been a consideration: that it was something that my parents themselves would also have been, well, slightly embarrassed by.